State of the Art is an Amiga demo by Spaceballs, and winner of The Party 1992 demo competition. It features vector silhouettes of dancers, occasionally morphing into geometric shapes, synchronised to a rave music soundtrack. The sequel to State of the Art was 9 Fingers.
The production of the demo was described in an interview in Amiga disc magazine R.A.W #5. It was created by videotaping footage of a dancer and converting it to vector data using a tool created by Lone Starr. The dancer was 17 year old Jannicke Selmer-Olsen who was dating Lone Starr at the time.
Despite winning The Party, opinion was split on State of the Art. Unlike other demos of the time which focused on outperforming other demos technically, State of the Art focused on being artistically pleasing.
State of the Art was also notorious for being fairly hardware specific, requiring an Amiga 500 with 1MB memory - the 512KB additional memory had to be from the expansion port underneath the computer, as the demo was coded to use memory in this memory space, rather than request memory from the OS.
Jannicke Selmer-Olsen now works for the "Norwegian design council".[1]